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It’s the Republican National Convention week, or as pundits on the right call it — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and whatever other major holiday you want to thrown in there. We break it all down: the pluses, the minus, the hits and the misses. And we make some predictions for the next couple of months. As you’re hear, we recorded this show on Zoom in front of an audience of our beloved Ricochet members. We’ll be doing a few more of these on Zoom before the election, so if you’d like to participate, join us!
Music from this week’s show: Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
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You’ve started to count DOWN, now?
This is 510, not 508.
How Rob-y of Rob to say that, contrary to his prediction last week, the Republican convention turned out to be much better than the Democrat convention… until Trump spoke.
So, Trump says “things are bad, re-elect us!” Does Rob really think that Trump has to specify “things are bad due to Democrat governors and mayors and prosecutors etc, so re-elect US who are NOT Democrats and will do what we can to counteract those idiots who are letting their cities burn and their citizens be attacked etc, until hopefully the voters in those areas wise up and stop electing those Democrats?”
To coin a phrase, “boring is in the eye of the beholder.” The expectations for a presidential/re-election speech by someone like Rob, are likely very different from someone who hasn’t been… “trump-skeptical” to be kind… for the last 4 or 5 years.
And there are plenty of those who take “but Trump didn’t really build a wall like he promised!” to mean they now “have to” vote for Biden. Or just stay home. What nonsense.
I am so tired of Rob Long’s soft bigotry against Trump and his supporters.
I thought the live chat was fun.
Actually @peterrobinson, Joe Biden is quite unlikeable, if you notice things like his false accusations of drunk driving against a truck driver and blaming him for killing your wife and child, among the many other things that Biden is – to borrow a phrase from NeverTrumpers – “loathsome” about.
It’s the freaking auto-correct on the CMS side of the site. I hate it as much as you do. Help, @max?
As a wise man once said, “it’s the soft bigotry of Joe expectations.”
Thanks for doing it live, gents. That was interesting to watch (what snippets I could catch while WFH).
I thought that the complaint about Rob’s attitude went too far, and Rob’s response went too far. I found Day 4 of the RNC, the only day that I watched, to be quite well done. I thought that the President’s speech was pretty good, but not brilliant. A decent, workmanlike performance, a bit too long, with the occasional flash of that Trump humor. Especially the line about Biden giving the union guys hugs, and sometimes kisses.
He did seem to get a bit tired toward the end.
I agree with you, and there’s something else that is unusual about Trump. I don’t know whether it will work, but he’s not the usual incumbent.
He does have solid accomplishments to list, and he did so. But he also has a pretty good narrative about how he has been held back by nefarious forces, in Congress and the states and the cities and the deep state, and he can point to those in order to blame Democrats for problems.
Jerry Giordano is a wise man–and a good writer.
And I bet Ann Coulter is not going to vote for Biden, or not vote at all, because Trump didn’t “build the wall” like he “promised.”
When the left conflates disagreement with bigotry we call them snowflakes. Rightly.
Based on Rob’s attack on Larry Arnn in August 2016 for his support of Trump, we could say that he has reverse ESP. Before WuFlu, Trump was almost a lock for re-election. Now the tides are turning again in his favor. Take what Rob thinks about an election, bet on the other side and you won’t do too badly. 😀
@Dennis A. Garcia, I think you’ve been unfair to @Seawriter. Bigotry is a cast of mind. An Always-Trumper will start from the assumption that whatever Trump says or does is good while a Never-Trumper will assume that whatever Trump says or does is bad. For the Never-Trumper, it isn’t simply a matter of disagreeing with Trump; whatever position Trump takes is wrong. We’ve all heard the criticism of Never-Trumpers that if Trump were to advocate a policy that a Never-Trumper previously advocated, the Never-Trumper would jump into the pit of cognitive dissonance and condemn the policy.
I agree with James’s (Yes, I know I quoted Jerry here) observation that Trump has better energy when riffing at a rally than he displayed during the RNC speech, but I did see some of that energy around minute 50+ for some time. I didn’t stay for the final, final word, but left about two minutes early.
So, Jerry, if you’re saying his last two minutes were tired, I can’t comment, otherwise, I thought he actually hit a high point late in his speech and kept it there until repeating a list of things right at the end.
It’s difficult to examine Trump’s speech on its own. When he hit particular topics, it seemed the intent was for the viewer to recall one of the compelling speakers from the previous three days, as well as one or two from the same evening. It was a speech that collected the emotion and information from all of those speeches and attempted to rekindle fires stoked throughout the convention. Whether it was intentional or not, it succeeded in that doing that with me, though not throughout the speech.
Needs more of that, is all I was saying.
And let it be known that Yeti worked tirelessly to line up some clips to play, and we didn’t use but one. His unsung labors are innumerable.
Its an unusual election. The incumbent candidate can run as the change candidate. Joe Biden is an incumbent in his own right, he’s been in political life for 47 years. The world today is because of Joe Biden – he may not have driven it completely – but his finger prints are on it. Make him own it. Its the Biden Crime Bill VS First Step Act.
Before WuFlu? Name a government – anywhere in the world – that handled the pandemic better or quicker than the US? Go back to the state of the union address, go back to the Trump restricting travel from china and juxtapose the democrat reactions to it… Knowing the facts that we knew at the time, Trump acted while the democrats screamed xenophobia.
Donald Trump doesnt have to say anything to defend himself on the Virus, he just has to remind the public about the democrat response.
I remember back last winter being told that a couple million would die if we didn’t do handle it correctly.
170K doesn’t seem so bad compared to a couple million. We must have done something right.
Obligatory screen shot taken during the recording of this show:
And they say there won’t be a blue wave
True, to remember even further back to the 2016 election. We also told that Donald Trump would start nuclear wars, destroy the economy and kill millions. By the standards set by the democrats in 2016, Trump has been a roaring success.
Rob didn’t even say that Trump was wrong, much less assume it, only that his speech was boring. Which his fans predictably treated as an attack both on trump and on them: in other words a micro-aggression. I stand by my assertion that too many trump supporters are swiftly becoming everything they hate about the campus left.
Also would make a good advertisement for LensCrafters, or someother eyewear chain.
I will say that deliberately or not, low-energy Trump did not step on the messaging of the other speakers Thursday night, particularly that of Ann Dorn. High-energy, riftapalooza Trump throwing out red meat in every other sentence would have totally smothered the messaging of Thursday’s other speakers, as well as the convention’s overall theme of allowing ordinary people to voice their support of Trump and justify his re-election.
That doesn’t mean the speech couldn’t have been trimmed by 25-20 minutes, or that he couldn’t have done a better job in presentation. But when you get high-energy Trump, you also get a Trump throwing out wild lines that both enrage Democrats and the media, and also give both an excuse to focus the public’s attention on that, and not on whatever the next outrageous thing he’s said. Sedate Trump allowed the focus today to remain on why Joe Biden and the other Democrats omitted anything about the rioting, looting and burning or any mention of China from their convention, and why Biden-friendly pundits today were still yelling “Sister Soljuah Moment” about as much as Al Gore yelled “Dingle-Norwood” during the 2000 election campaign.
“Never interfere with your enemy when he’s destroying himself” is a saying Donald Trump rarely adheres to, because he can’t help himself from wanting to stir up trouble. But by being un-Trumpianly dull Thursday night, he also gave the media little red meat to obsess about on Friday (though of course, this situation might not still be true by the time the Sunday news shows roll around…)
When do we talk about that pinky ring? Are Rob Long and Rudy Giuliani in some club?
People who don’t pay attention are likely to blame President Trump. Any research at all would show that Trump is against the looters and rioters. But many voters don’t do any research at all.